The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  “I’m going to go change,” he said. “And then I’m taking you out to dinner.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’m really not up for dinner. How about a rain check?”

  He sighed. “Jen, I wish you’d just—”

  “Just what?”

  “I don’t know.” He paused. “Throw something at me. Scream at me. Get angry, for God’s sake.”

  I turned away from him. “I’m not angry,” I said, but even as I said it, I thought that maybe I was. I just wasn’t sure I was angry at him.

  Will went upstairs to change, and I got myself a glass of Merlot and went out to sit on the back patio. It was a mild night, for November, and I was comfortable in only my sweater and jeans. As I sipped the wine by myself, I closed my eyes and thought about last year’s auction—about the red dress I’d worn, about the veal piccata I’d gotten the club to serve for only the price of chicken. The night had flowed, people milling about, bids being placed, everyone kissing my cheeks and telling me what a great job I’d done. And this was it right here, the one thing I’d really and truly liked—no, loved—about living in Deerfield. Being in charge of something great, something worthwhile.

  When I looked up now, I caught a glimpse of Lisa, in her own red ball gown, standing in her kitchen, the little heads of Chance and Chester bobbing up and down. Even from far away, I could tell by the way she held herself that she was tired, that she didn’t even really want to go to the auction, and it didn’t seem fair, that she got to go and I didn’t.

  I finished the glass of wine, and then I was too exhausted for dinner. I went upstairs, took my herbs, and got into bed.

  I was walking down the plush red carpet in the entranceway of the club, holding on to Barry’s arm. I looked down to adjust my dress. Red wasn’t my favorite color, but Barry liked it.

  Bethany was standing up ahead, by the door to the ballroom. She wore a black strapless gown that overemphasized her bust and her thin waist. I sucked my stomach in.

  “Would you look at the tits on her,” Barry whispered.

  “Oh Jesus, Barry.”

  “What? I’m just saying. I wonder who did them for her. I bet it was Stevens. No, Markowitz.”

  I frowned. I had a headache. I wasn’t in the mood for an auction, for a night of sucking in my stomach just to look half as thin as everyone else here, a night of listening to boring people talk about boring things. But I continued walking, one foot in front of the other, holding on to Barry’s arm.

  We each picked up a bid book, found our table, and sat down. Bethany had put us at a table with other doctors, guys Barry knew with wives I did not. Barry started talking to them, while I folded and refolded my napkin in my lap. “I’m going to bid on the golf lesson with Chuck Jagger,” I heard Barry say to another guy, a high-risk ob-gyn named Killigan whom Barry had wanted me to consult with when I was pregnant with the twins.

  I flipped through. There was nothing in the auction book that interested me: Dates and lessons. Yacht trips and dinners. I’d take friendship, real conversation, a challenge. How much for those?

  I nudged Barry. “When are you going to have time for a golf lesson?” I said, thinking that I already never saw him.

  He laughed and said, “Come on, Lisa,” as if my question wasn’t even a real one. As if he didn’t already work twelve-hour days, and worry more about other women’s breasts than mine.

  Bethany walked to the front of the room; she was glowing. She was enjoying this, stepping in, stepping over everything Jen had done. She talked and talked. She got some bids, but she wasn’t aggressive, not persistent, not even kindly nagging us to remember what the money went to and how much breast cancer needed us, the way Jen always did.

  Then the golf lesson. Barry stood up right away. “Five hundred,” he called out.

  “Five-fifty,” Bethany’s husband, Kevin, said.

  They went back and forth like this until Barry won the half-hour golf lesson for $1,025. When he sat down, I gave him a look. “What?” He shrugged. “It’s for a good cause.”

  Fourteen

  The next morning, Sunday, the details of the auction were splashed all over the front page of the Deerfield Daily. “Deerfield’s Finest Donate Time and Money to Cancer Research,” the headline read. They had raised $12,000 for the Helen Kemper Memorial Cancer Fund, which, really, wasn’t bad, but last year we’d raised $17,500. I couldn’t help but feel a little smug, and then a little sad. I shook my head. Cancer research, for Christ’s sake. And I’d been booted out of that, of wanting to, of knowing how to, do some good.

  On page seven, the article continued with a collage of pictures: Bethany in a black ball gown, smiling at the mike. Lisa’s Barry standing up in a tux, bidding for an afternoon with golf pro Chuck Jagger. The article said he won it for $1,025, the highest bid of the night.

  $1,025. It sounded familiar. Exact.

  I went and got my reporter’s pad, and there it was, written in my own writing. Barry bought the lesson with Chuck Jagger for $1,025. Lisa is annoyed. She’s already alone too much.

  I sat down, the paper shaking in my hands. There must be some mistake. I couldn’t have really dreamed that, the exact amount of money, that golf pro. Was that the golf pro we’d booked last year? Had he sold for that much? I thought about Ethel, saying that my dreams were only my conscious discovering what my subconscious already knew, but how the hell did it already know this?

  I grabbed my cell, found her number again, and called her, and even though it was Sunday morning, I left her a message to call me right away.

  While I waited for her to call back, I paced the kitchen floor and tried to take deep breaths. There must be some logical explanation. There had to be.

  I jumped when I heard my cell ring, and I ran to grab it.

  “Ethel,” I said, my voice trembling.

  “Jennifer, is everything okay?”

  “No,” I said. “No. I don’t think it is.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you still dreaming?”

  “They aren’t dreams.” I paused. “They’re real things. Things that happened. To other people.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “The transformation of things,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s what he called it. He once said he dreamed he was a butterfly, and then he woke up and he was a man. But then he wasn’t sure if he really was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly only dreaming he was a man.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting at, and I wasn’t at all in the mood for some mumbo-jumbo Eastern medicine theory. There had to be an explanation, a rational one. Maybe the dream was just something I’d heard, something I’d guessed. Or it could be a coincidence. $1,025 felt like a nice round number, something I might dream up on my own.

  But that’s not what Ethel had been saying at all—she’d said something about transforming, about not being sure if you were one thing or another. And what the hell was that supposed to mean? Was she saying I really was Lisa, and I was only dreaming now, dreaming as Jen? I knew that couldn’t be right—I could remember an entire long history of my life—Jen’s life—a funeral in the snow at the age of thirteen, a blind date in an Italian restaurant at age twenty-six.

  “I don’t understand,” I finally said, feeling even more confused now than before she’d called.

  “It is funny, the way our mind can play tricks on us,” she said. “Sometimes everything is not as it seems, Jennifer.” She paused. “A dream is only a dream. Even Freud never thought they were real.”

  “A dream is only a dream,” I repeated back, trying to believe it the way she seemed to.

  “Jennifer, try to relax. If the dreams keep bothering you, we can adjust at your next appointment. But it’s good that you’re sleeping so well.”

 
After we hung up I flipped back through my notepad, reviewing the dreams. Maybe Ethel was right, and a dream was a dream was a dream. But maybe she wasn’t. After all, she’d told me once that she was not a miracle worker at all, only a healer. Maybe the dreams were real. And even Ethel didn’t have the knowledge or the understanding of how that could be possible, how a simple herb could transform your mind into something so oddly metamorphic.

  And if they were real, then there was so much I knew now, oddly so much more than I’d known when I’d been close to Kat or Lisa. And Will—what had the broken dreams about Will even meant? That being a judge had made him literally sick? I ached for Will, for the way his job had made him feel, and for the way I’d pulled away from him because I’d thought it was the job that he really loved, not me.

  This is ridiculous, I told myself. Listen to Ethel. Forget about the dreams. Yet, no matter how many times I repeated this in my head, I still couldn’t bring myself to really believe it.

  After a shower and some coffee, last night’s dream, the auction felt further away, felt like something that couldn’t have possibly happened at all. I went and cleaned up the paper, and then lying underneath, I saw a note on the table from Will. MEETING DANNY TO WATCH THE GAME. HOME FOR DINNER. LOVE, WILL. Love, Will. He was shouting it at me, in all caps again, and maybe that was the only way he knew how to express it, like this, a silent but authentic battle cry. Then I felt a little sad, thinking of the way he’d looked at me last night, stunned and broken, like a sick bird.

  Since Will was with Danny I decided to give Kat a call and see what she was up to. Back before we moved to Deer-field, before Kat had the girls, Will and Danny had watched football together nearly every Sunday while Kat and I had gone shopping or to lunch. When the weather was still nice enough, we’d sit outside, sip nonfat mochas, and do the Timescrossword puzzle together. It was the only way either one of us could ever finish it, sharing answers. Kat said that didn’t make us dumb, just resourceful.

  It had been years since I’d done the Times puzzle on a Sunday. Not because I didn’t have the time in Deerfield, but because I didn’t have Kat.

  “You busy?” I asked, when she picked up.

  She sighed. “The girls are supposed to be at a birthday party in thirty minutes, and I haven’t even gotten them dressed yet.” She paused. “You all right? You sound funny.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, thinking of her and Grant in the coffee shop, and wondering if it had been real. If she was actually cheating on Danny. “I’ve just been—”

  “Sarah Lynne, do not hit your sister with the hairbrush.” The days of mochas and the Times puzzle were long over for Kat, too, though maybe in her case, not by choice. Case in point, Will. Why we shouldn’t have kids. Don’t we already have enough problems as it is? Kat sighed again. “If I disappear check the mental hospital. I may just have to check myself in.” Or Grant’s apartment, I silently added, though I had no idea if Grant even lived in an apartment or not. “Sorry,” she said. “You were saying.”

  “Oh, nothing. I’ve just been having these vivid dreams. They’re freaking me out a little bit,” I said, leaving out the most important part.

  “God, I wish I got enough sleep to actually dream.” She sighed. “Or any time to think, for that matter.” She paused. “Fucking birthday parties are the worst. And on a Sunday.” She paused. “Hey, you wanna come?”

  “After that hard sell?” I laughed.

  “No, really, you should come. It’s my cousin Emily’s daughter.Remember her?” Emily. I did remember. The opposite of Kat in every way. She was such a devoutly religious member of some sect of Christianity that I couldn’t remember, that she and her husband hadn’t even kissed until their wedding night. She was a photographer who did some freelance work for City Style from time to time, a fact I always hid from Kelly because I knew it would make her bug me about trying to get her in, too. “Come on. I was going to sneak some vodka in my purse. We’ll watch the kids bat a piñata around and get hammered.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Okay. Buzzed. Slightly buzzed,” she said. “You’d be doing me a favor, really. I hate going to these things alone. Having to talk to all the bitchy stay-at-home moms. Please? Pretty please?”

  And though a birthday party did not sound exactly like refuge, I was eager to get out of the house, out of my own head, so I agreed to go.

  Kat was right. The Sunday morning birthday party was hell. Screaming children running through a crowded downstairs, a piñata on the chilly back patio, at which the children also screamed.

  “There’s a lot of screaming,” I whispered to Kat.

  She passed over her Sprite can, which I’d seen her slip the vodka into after she’d first arrived. “Have some,” she said. “It helps.”

  I shook my head. “No thanks.”

  She shot me a look. “You’re pregnant?”

  “What?” I laughed nervously. Had Kat noticed the extra five pounds and assumed? “No way.”

  “Are you sure?” She raised her eyebrows. “You said you were having vivid dreams and now you don’t want to drink, so I sort of assumed …”

  “You have vivid dreams when you’re pregnant?”

  “Oh God, completely,” she said. “When I was pregnant with Sarah Lynne, I had this dream that I was in Munchkin-land, you know, in The Wizard of Oz.” I nodded. “I was like the fucking queen Munchkin or something, and all the little people kept coming by to wash my shoes. And I swear to God, when I woke up, I really thought it was real.” She paused to take a drink out of the Sprite can. “Oh, and then there’s the sex dreams. Ironic, huh? Just when you turn into a beached whale, you can’t get enough of sex. Though in the dreams I was never pregnant. Just really skinny. Like size zero. With boobs.” She held her hands up to emphasize. “Big ones.” Kat is more like a size six and probably a B cup like me, so it was clear that her dreams were more fantasy than reality. Nothing like mine.

  I laughed nervously, looking around to see if Christian Emily could hear us, but she looked engrossed in making sure some kid didn’t smash her daughter, rather than the piñata, with the giant red plastic bat. The kid’s aim was despicable, and he kept hitting the picnic table instead. “No,” I said. “Kat, it’s nothing like that. I’m not pregnant. I swear. No sex dreams.” I felt a little bit thankful that I hadn’t had any. That would be weird. I’d never be able to look at Barry, or Danny, or Grant, or maybe even Will again, if I had a dream like that. “I did have a dream about you, though.” She raised her eyebrows, and she chugged the rest of the can of Sprite. “You were with that guy Grant, who took over my old job.”

  “Oh, I was?” She looked away, toward the piñata, as if she found a half-smashed Dora the Explorer the most fascinating thing in the world.

  “Are you sleeping with him?” No, fucking him, I thought, to use her terminology, her thoughts.

  “Was I, in your dream?” I shook my head. “Too bad,” she said. She took a cigarette out of her purse, but I pulled it out of her hand before she could light it. “What?”

  “You can’t smoke at a kids’ birthday party.” It bewildered me that I understood this and she did not.

  “I wasn’t going to smoke it for real,” she said. “Just hold it in my hand and think about smoking it.” I handed it back to her. She held it in her palm, clasped and unclasped her hand. “That’s weird,” she said. “That you dreamed about me and him.” She cleared her throat. “There have been a few times when I’ve thought about it. Him. I mean, haven’t you ever thought about another guy?”

  I shook my head. It was true, I hadn’t. Things hadn’t been and weren’t the best between Will and me, but I’d never thought about cheating, finding someone else. I just assumed things would get better eventually or they wouldn’t. Another man never felt like the solution to anything.

  “Well, it’s different for you,” she said. “You don’t have kids. Kids change everything.” She held the cigarette out as if thinking about smoking it, then c
lasped it back in her hand.

  “How?” I asked.

  “They just do.” She waved her hand in the air. “You know, Danny works late. I work late. Then when we get home it’s all about the kids, getting them dinner, and playing with them and bathing them and getting them to bed. Before you know it, it’s ten o’clock, you have food crusted on your shirt, and you’re more fucking exhausted than you could ever imagine. And then it all repeats. Day after day.” She held the cigarette between two fingers, and I noticed her hand was shaking. “It happens,” she said. “People fall out of love, after they have kids.”

  I reached out for her shaking hand. “It doesn’t happen to you. You and Danny. You guys are fucking Kat and Danny,” I said. I pictured them the way they were six years ago, wrapped around each other on the couch in Will’s apartment, their legs inextricably linked as if they were one person, their laughter coming in tandem as Will told a story about work, and I could still remember wishing that Will and I could be like them, could be them. They really are the perfect couple, I’d said to Will after they went home.

  He’d nodded in agreement and added, Their happiness is so … tangible. So if Kat and Danny couldn’t survive, then what chance would Will and I ever have?

  Kat laughed wryly. “That was a long time ago,” she said, as if she, too, was remembering that same night—just about a month before Will and I got engaged, when she and Danny were still an entity of perfection. “Now we’re just tired. And,” she added, “we haven’t had sex in six months.”

  I thought about the way Kat had felt when she was with Grant, that warm spark, the tingling in her legs. It must’ve been the way she’d felt once with Danny, and I knew it was the way I’d felt with Will. She had to be able to get that back with Danny. She had to. Because if she could, that meant that maybe Will and I had a chance, too. “Hey, you know what?” I said, without really thinking it through. “You and Danny should go away for the weekend and let me and Will watch the girls.”